Tuesday, 13 May 2014

And so, to bring you up to date, we have 3 FREE stories from my most recent collection, Lunch Hour. All 30 of these stories were written in April and feature the many inhabitants of a single office, and what happens to them during their lunch hour. There is love and loss, life and death, shopping and aliens... you know, the usual. These disparate flash-fictions work together to create a picture of a complete world which is both recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time.

Noah’s hands
were sweating, slipping on the keyboard, making typos entirely outside of his
control. Every few seconds his gaze slid from the words of his email down to
the clock in the bottom corner of the screen, and then back. In the interim his
interpretation of spelling and gram-mar took further diversions, but he was no
longer reading the text he was typing, or caring about what it said.

He was
waiting, counting down, waiting for twelve o’clock and for his lunch hour to
start.

He ran
through his plan one last time.

12.00 – stop
working, lock the computer, switch off the screen,

12.01 – take
the box out of the top desk-drawer on the right.

12.03 – walk
out of the building and turn right towards Covent Garden.

12.14 –
arrive at the Garden and wait.

12.15 –
Annie arrives.

12.20 – sit
down on their bench.

12.30 –
finish eating the sandwiches which Annie will bring. It’s her turn and there’s
no way to stop her without giving the game away.

12.35 –
remove box from pocket.

12.35:30 –
get down on one knee.

12.36 –
finish asking the question.

Once more he
tried to move the plan forward in his mind, to see what might come after the
question, but he couldn’t make it work. He could see everything up until that
moment, but not beyond.

He felt a
fresh slick of sweat seep from the pores on his hands. A separate trickle ran
down between his shoulder blades.

He stopped
typing and looked up over the heads of all his friends and colleagues to the
clock on the wall, the clock which dictated everything, the clock which held
his life in its hands.

The seconds
ticked away: slowly, so slowly.

And then, at
last, it was time.

You Are What
You Eat

Typical. The
lift’s out. Nineteen floors by stairs, plus the office to office. It’s not what
I signed up for.

Still, this
isn’t the job I wanted. It isn’t a job anyone would want. But at the moment,
any job is worth having. Or jobs. When I finish here, it’s the afternoon shift
in the shop, then off to the Hounds for the evening – late licence tonight –
then up early for the morning shift behind the desk at the vet’s. Altogether
it’s just about enough to pay for the flat.

It helps to
be young, and it helps to be blonde. Getting the only kind of job that’s
available at the moment is much easier when you can flash a smile, maybe a bit
of leg or a bit of boob. Does that make me a bad feminist? Well, so be it. I
reckon it makes me a realist.

It also helps with the tips. You don’t get
many at the vet’s – the customers feel they’re paying enough as it is – but the
saucer fills up well at the shop, and I get a lot behind the bar, especially if
I choose my top carefully.

Funny,
though, the best tips I get are on the office run, here in particular.

Prawn Mayo
And Tuna Sweetcorn barges past me as I start up the first flight. I don’t mind,
it’s not his day anyway. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he has his double
order. He tips well, but not as well as some of the others. Don’t think he
notices my charms – mind on other things.

Still, his
floor usually does me well. There’s Plain Ham on White – a quid or two most
days and a fiver on a Friday. I put up with the pat on the bottom and the
patronising attitude because that’s what I’m being paid for.

Beef and
Horseradish on Brown is a regular one-fifty every day – and no pat. Which is a
bit of shame, he’s quite a good-looking bloke. I wouldn’t have to plaster a
fake smile like I do for Plain Ham.

The four
Chicken Salads share a bank of desks. They always have a laugh about their
shared order. They share a laugh about everything. It’s only a couple of quid
on a Friday from all of them, but that doesn’t matter, as their boss is a
fiver-a-day man.

I know why
he does that, of course. He reckons he’s buying my silence, but I wouldn’t say
anything anyway. I mean, who cares about a bit of porn? I could have told you
by looking at him that he was the kind of man who wants to wear nappies and be
spanked, I didn’t need to see his screen to know that.

I save
Turkey on Wholemeal for last. She’s the highlight of my day, and the only woman
in this whole block who orders from us.

I don’t know
why we have so few women. Maybe they bring their own. I see some of them eating
pasta or salad from Tupperware. Maybe they order from somewhere else where the
delivery comes from a hunky, ‘Diet Coke’ kinda guy rather than me. Who knows,
or cares? All I’m bothered about is keeping Turkey on Wholemeal happy.

She doesn’t
tip, except at Christmas, but I don’t care about that either.

It’s not
that I fancy her. There wouldn’t be a problem if I did. I’ve tried that, and it
was nice, but I prefer blokes if I’m honest. And she’s too old for me, anyway.

No, I like
her because turkey on wholemeal was what my mum used to eat. And she looks a
bit like my mum. And on the corner of her desk is a photo of her when she was
younger, with a man, and two kids, and she’s wearing a waitress’s uniform.

She’s the
boss of this whole place now, and I look at her and I know that she had to put
up with the pats on the bum and the constant call of ‘darling’ and I know that
if she can do it, so can I.

Clearing Up

Mark chewed
on his beef sandwich without really tasting it, not even the zing of the
horseradish penetrating his concentration.

The morning
had dragged as he entered figures into spreadsheets, sorted them, applied
formulae and generally did whatever it was he got paid for. His mind had not
been on the job, how-ever, and everything had taken him a lot longer than it
should. He had been waiting for lunch time – the one time of day they were
allowed to use the computers for personal activities.

And now,
with the clock having ticked past the meridian, and half of his colleagues
having left to run their various errands, he was able to chew his unnoticed
mouthfuls and try to break his girlfriend’s passwords.

He knew some
of them. She had told him the ones for Netflix and the Sky account. They were
both based on the name of her first pet: ‘Hercules12’ and ‘hercuLes9’, so he
had some inkling of what others were likely to be, the trick was to get them
right without triggering any security lockouts.

He’d been
through her desk at home, so he knew the account numbers for her bank accounts,
and her online login codes. He’d been through her phone so he knew that she
also used ‘HerCuLes666’ and ‘astrid7’, but he didn’t know what for.

His first
job, as he saw it, was to break into her email. If he could get that, then he
would have access to the email reminders for passwords and usernames and then
his job would be easier.

Luckily the
email didn’t seem to care how many times you got the password wrong, so he was
able to open it on his ninth try with, of all things, ‘hercules’.

After that,
he got onto a winning streak. The bank accounts used the second of the two
pass-words from her phone. Once in, he quickly transferred most of her savings
into his account. He left the money in her current account. Clearing her out
completely might look suspicious.

While he was
there, he checked to see if her pay had gone in yet. When he saw that it hadn’t
he logged into her work system (using the wonders of ‘Forgotten Password?’) and
exchanged her bank details for his. The money would go in tonight, and then he
could change it back.

He read
through her emails, oddly wondering if there was anything else he ought to do,
but he seemed to have caught it all. So he gave a sigh of relief and logged off
from her systems. He shut down the windows, wiped his browsing history and
cookies, and sat back in his chair.

He looked up
at the clock on the wall. It wasn’t even half past. He’d managed it all in less
than thirty minutes.

He popped
the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, savouring the flavour that he
had so far ignored. Perhaps it would be a good idea to get out into the
sunshine for a little walk before he started back. After all, he would probably
be spending the afternoon working up another worry as he waited for home time,
and the fresh air would calm him.

He thought
ahead to what awaited him. He would leave, get home, eat tea, and then phone
his girlfriend. When she didn’t answer, he would get worried and go round. When
she didn’t come to the door he would go in and find her dead on the floor – in
the same pose he had found her the previous night: spread-eagled at the bottom
of the stairs, a loose slipper hanging from one foot – and then he would
finally ring the police and tell them the terrible news.